Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Why WiFi isn't so Fly..

You think you have the latest gadjets and gizmos in your hands as you're holding a mobile phone equipped with bluetooth and WiFi. Well, I've just realised we have just been conned for years by these companies offering us technology bit by bit (sic).
Nikola Tesla, alongside AC electricity and the lightbulb and pretty much everything else that makes our world "modern", invented back in the 1930s, a way to transfer electricity wirelessly (forget those ugly cables) and also to send sound and pictures wirelessly from one place to another on this planet.
So why the hell do we only get access to this technology now, over 70 years later?
This, just like the engines that don't run on petrol (by explosion) but with water (by implosion) is just the best way the industrials that had access to this technology found to exploit us (the dumb people) and make us pay over the odds for something that should be free.
Nikola Tesla, this great mind, wanted us to work with nature and not against it but sadly his great inventions ended up in the hands of people that were not so happy with giving free electricity to the whole planet (as was already possible in 1930!).
Same for the mobile telecommunications, this "revolution" could have happened 70 years ago but some people decided to wait until they could monitor the whole planet before giving you (the dumb people) access to any of this magic.
Watch this movie and you will understand more: Secret of Nikola Tesla

Monday, May 12, 2008

Use Scroogle to search the web!!!!!

There are two reasons why an ad-free scraper of Google's main search results is important. One reason is personal, and the other is political.

On a personal level, your support for Scroogle says that search engines should not be tracking you and retaining this information indefinitely. Not only does Google scrape much of the web, but they keep records of who searches for what. If information about your searching is accessible by cookie ID or by your IP address, it is subject to subpoena. This is a violation of your privacy. Someday Google's data retention practices will be regulated, because Google is too arrogant to do the right thing voluntarily. In the meantime, you should not be leaving your fingerprints in Google's databases.

There are other proxies that can protect your privacy on the web. Almost all are general-purpose proxies that cloak all of your web activity behind an IP address that is not easily traced to your service provider. One is Anonymizer.com. A possible problem with this one is that the founder, Lance Cottrell, has connections with the FBI and the Voice of America. It also costs money for a reasonable level of service. Another is Tor, which is much more secure. But it is also slow, because Tor is a complicated system that needs networks of volunteers to run server software. Juvenile surfers from video pirates to rogue Wikipedia editors tend to clog free services such as Tor, which slows them down even more.

Since Scroogle does just one thing, it is fairly fast and simple. But because it does only one thing, it is vulnerable to action by Google. They could block our IP address, which would require that we relay requests to other servers that are more difficult for them to locate. They could also centralize their system more in order to better detect and throttle any outside address that does too many searches per minute. Finally, they could make minor changes in their output format on a regular basis, which would break our scraper and require frequent reprogramming. Any of the above might quickly get too complex and expensive for us, and that would be the end of Scroogle.

One action that Google is less likely to take is to serve Scroogle with a cease and desist letter. This introduces the second reason why Scroogle deserves support. As a nonprofit with a history of activism on privacy issues, it would be difficult for Google to sue us on the grounds that their search results and rankings are copyrighted. The main reason for this is that we are noncommercial. None of our sites has ever carried ads, we have zero employees, and our gross annual income is about $10,000. Our lack of commercial intent strengthens our claim that we have the right to scrape Google. It's obvious that we are doing it in the public interest.